Tuesday, July 7, 2015

"We Are All Southerners Now"

The late Southern writer and historian Sam Francis often noted the war against traditional American culture and that Southern symbols were first in line because they were easy targets. He understood that "those pushing these attacks are driven by their own racial and class hatreds . . . [and] feels little identity with most of American history and regards it largely as a nightmare from which it is trying to awaken."

"What is also going on with the attack on the Confederate flag, on the part of the groups like the NAACP and the blacks it represents, is a kind of racial secession from American society. When blacks say that George Washington is the equivalent of David Duke or denounce or reject the major icons of our history as bigots and hatemonger, they are in effect saying that they are not part of the society that adopts these symbols.

What demonstrators in the NAACP's march against the flag in South Carolina carried signs that said: "Your Heritage is Our Slavery," they are essentially announcing that they rejected the heritage of the State and indeed the nation, and in rejecting the heritage they were also rejecting the nation itself.

But many of the blacks are not really announcing their secession from the nation. What they are announcing is their intention to reconfigure the nation, to use political power based on their own racial solidarity to redefine the nation and its heritage in terms that will be acceptable to them.

At the same time blacks also demand racial integration, affirmative action, and reparations, they are also demanding that the whites with whom they are to be integrated and from whom they are demanding special privileges give up their own symbols and heroes and actually adopt those of blacks – Arthur Ashe, civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King, etc.

What we are seeing in this concerted and protracted attack on Southern and even national and other ethnic symbols, my friends, is nothing less than a crusade for the overthrow of any symbol that suggests white – dare I say the real – heritage and history of this country and their replacement by their own symbols and their own racial propaganda and mythology.

The slogans of "color blindness" and racial neutrality that lay behind the rhetoric of the civil rights movement have failed and have been abandoned by the blacks themselves. What is now being asserted is not the demand to be accepted into white institutions but the demand that white institutions be turned over to non-whites and that non-whites occupy the same positions of dominance that whites once held.

[In much] of the white South and the rest of the country, [blacks] are able to play on white guilt and cowardice to gain their demands. Hispanics also are increasing playing it, especially in areas like California where they will soon be a majority of the population.

Unless whites – Southerners as well as non-Southerners – learn to have the courage to demand that the symbols of their heritage and their identity be respected and honored in the places where they have always been respected and honored, what we can expect to see, as whites cease to be a majority in the country, is the continuing destruction of those symbols and with them the heritage and identity they symbolize.

It is really a war against the entire nation, and the entire civilization and the people that formed them, and we can win that war only when we make others in the nation and civilization grasp that they are next, that the symbols that define their identity are no more immune from being denounced as "racist" than ours are.

In a word, what we need to teach those who are now among our enemies but who should be on our side is that we are all Southerners now."